TRUEL1F3 (Truelife)

by Jay Kristoff

  The man gestured, and Eve saw another sun lounge beside his. An identical drink rested on the chair’s arm, and a towel was laid out on the wood. The fabric was printed with a familiar shape—a small, agile-looking machina in hot pink urban camo, the words KISS THIS sprayed across its hind parts.

  “Miss Combobulation,” Eve breathed.

  A wave of melancholy washed over her at the sight, the memory of that dream: her life in Dregs with Lemon, little Cricket, Grandpa.

  Except he wasn’t her grandpa, was he?

  He’d lied to me about that, just like all the rest of it.

  Anger seeped back into her mind, swallowed her nostalgia under sticky black. The waves shushed about her ankles, a song of azure and salt on her skin. Every sense was alive and tingling; she could smell the flowers and the ocean, hear and feel the whispering waves, see the crescent of lush green palms rising up from pale dunes ahead. There was no place on earth left like this, she knew.

  And this, she realized with a sinking feeling, is no dream.

  Her memory was returning now. Drowning those images of the WarDome. Of Ezekiel in her bed. She remembered the attack on New Bethlehem. She and Gabriel and Uriel in the cryo-chamber beneath the Brotherhood’s desalination plant. Ana’s body—her doppelgänger, her twisted reflection—frozen inside her glass coffin.

  She could hear Ezekiel’s words, hanging like ghosts on the wind.

  I know you! The girl you were built to be, and the girl you became afterward. And this girl I see in front of me now isn’t anything like either of them!

  That’s the point, she’d replied.

  She looked at the man in his sun lounge, her anger rising.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “My name is Danael Drakos,” he replied.

  “But who are you?” she demanded.

  The man sipped his drink.

  “I’m the chief executive officer of Daedalus Technologies,” he said. “It’s truly a pleasure to meet you, Miss Monrova.”

  “I told you. My name is Eve.”

  “Well, no,” Drakos said, still smiling. “Not technically. From what we’ve surmised, Eve was the name Silas Carpenter gave you after GnosisLabs collapsed and he fled with you to Dregs. The name you were born with—or, more accurately, made to answer to—was Ana Monrova.”

  She looked this man over, from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. She could see a glowing subdermal implant at his wrist, the sleek lines of a Memdrive above his right temple, ’trodes beneath his left ear. Either he was born perfect or he’d undergone extensive surgery, sculpting him into an image of masculine beauty. Truth told, he looked too good to be real, and to Eve, that made him look anything but. He was like one of those 20C boy dolls she’d sometimes find in the Scrap—the ones with the permanent smile and sculpted pecs and a smooth featureless lump where the interesting parts of the crotch should’ve been.

  He looks like a human trying to look like one of us.

  “I get to decide my own name, cockroach,” she spat.

  “Miss Monrova,” the man said, peering at her over the top of his sunglasses. “From now on, I’m afraid you get to decide nothing at all.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re safe. You’re in Daedalus custody.”

  “Where’s Gabriel? Faith and Verity?”

  “The whereabouts of your sisters is unknown,” Drakos said. “And largely irrelevant. Your brother Gabriel is in our care, but I’m afraid he’s a little worse for wear. Our field agent was a touch…overenthusiastic during acquisition.”

  Eve remembered the shoot-out under New Bethlehem, pulsing red light and oily black metal and cool white frost on her lips. She could see her brawl with Ezekiel in her mind’s eye, the pair of them crashing against each other with a rage that mirrored their old passion. She remembered the kaleidoscope of emotions—joy, sorrow, guilt, pain—roiling inside her chest as she hurt him, oh, how she’d hurt him. And she remembered herself standing over Zeke, bloody hands and ragged breath, as a dark figure blasted a handful of holes through her chest.

  A black hat. A red right hand.

  “Preacher,” she whispered.

  “Sincerest apologies for his treatment of you. He was a good man once. His recent failures, coupled with his violent conduct, make the board question how much longer he’ll be of use to this Corporation. But enough about him.” Drakos’s perfect teeth flashed again, his smile too good to be true. “Now, Miss Monrova…actually, would you mind terribly if I called you Ana?”

  “Would you mind terribly if I kicked your teeth out of your head?”

  “Charming,” Drakos chuckled. “We have some questions for you, if you don’t mind. Our techs can unearth their answers eventually, but it will prove less stressful on your mental faculties if you volunteered them.” He leaned forward, peered at her intently. “Please understand, all of us on the Daedalus board are ardent admirers of your father’s work. Personally speaking, I consider you a masterpiece, Ana.”

  “You call me Ana one more time,” Eve growled, “I’m going to hurt you in ways you never dreamed.”

  “Your erstwhile comrade,” Drakos said, sipping his drink. “Lemon Fresh.”

  Eve’s stomach flipped at the name, her hands curling into fists. Lemon had lied to her, just like all the rest of them. After their falling-out, Eve had been happy to see the girl’s back, talking true. But despite all the hurtful, hateful things Eve had spat into her face, Lemon had still tried to save her in Babel. Despite what lay between them—the deceit and the anger and all that Eve had done and become since she left Lemon behind—that little redheaded trouble-machine had still been her bestest. And that still counted for something.

  “What about her?” Eve asked.

  “You’re aware she’s a genetic abnormality? What do you know of her abilities?”

  “Nothing I’m about to share with you, cockroach.”

  Drakos steepled his fingers at his chin. “Ana, please, I—”

  Eve moved, lightning quick, one moment standing in the water, the next, beside Drakos. She dragged him out of his chair and struck him with her closed fist, knuckles mashing right into his infuriating smirk.

  She threw all her weight into it. All her rage. His sunglasses flew loose, and his jaw shattered like porcelain, bone and meat pulping. The strength of her lifelike body was enough to snap his neck, the wet crunching of his vertebrae rolling up her arm as his head lolled atop his broken spinal column.

  He was dead, she realized.

  Snuffed out in her arms, just like that.

  The thing she’d become—more human than human than human—couldn’t help but feel disdain in the face of something so hopelessly fragile. The body in her grip disgusted her, and she let it drop, thump thud, into the sand at her feet. Staring at the bright red splashed across her knuckles.

  “Feel better?” came a voice from behind her.

  She turned, and there was Drakos, seated in an identical lounge with an identical smile on his face and an identical drink in his hand. Glancing behind, Eve saw the first lounge was gone, the corpse at her feet vanished, the blood on her knuckles wiped clean. Just as she suspected.

  “This is a sim,” she said. “You’ve got me plugged into a virtch unit.”

  “Well spotted,” Drakos replied.

  Eve had tried a few virtual reality programs over the years in Dregs. Grandpa had a suite of VR history reels, some nature clips; Eve had even experimented with a few skin sims in her Los Diablos days, black-market, X-rated, handed out among her cronies. But you had to wear a bodysuit and float inside a sensory deprivation tank to get the full physical experience of VR, and none of the sims she’d tried came close to this level of detail. She looked up at the sky overhead, curled her toes in the sand, inhaled the salt-sweet scent of the ocean, shaking her head.

&
nbsp; “Impressive,” she admitted.

  “It’s a new platform we’re putting to market in quarter three,” Drakos explained. “A wetware interface that almost completely bypasses the need for physical peripherals, such as goggles and whatnot. Instead, it plugs directly into the neural network. It will completely revolutionize the way we interact with so-called reality. We call it Truelife.”

  That now-familiar pulse of blood-red light raced across the sky again, that same twinge of pain crackled across Eve’s temples. It was sharper this time, brighter, and she pressed her hand to her brow, hissing.

  “Apologies,” Drakos said. “We have you heavily medicated, but it seems your artificial neural network suffers trauma the same way a real human’s does. The pain will stop soon, your session is almost over for the day.”

  She winced as the pain subsided. “Session?”

  “We wouldn’t normally need to perform quite so invasive a dive if we were simply replicating wave patterns. But I’m afraid your lifelike physiology is proving somewhat difficult for our techs to negotiate. And you have some information that’s rather pertinent to us.” Drakos shrugged. “As I said, things would go far smoother if you were to simply volunteer the information about Miss Fresh.”

  “You’re mapping my brainwaves?” she said.

  “I believe I just explained that, yes.”

  Eve’s eyes narrowed as realization struck her. “You’re going to use them to break into the Myriad computer inside Babel.”

  Drakos finished his drink, placed the glass aside. “Ana Monrova is brain-dead. But you are an almost-perfect copy of her. Between the topography of her physical form and your baseline to operate from, we feel we can adequately replicate the real Ana’s pattern. As I said, we on the Daedalus board are ardent admirers of your father’s work. His vision for the world was flawed, but he was still an exceptional artiste. We feel his legacy shouldn’t die with him.”

  “And I said he’s not my father,” Eve spat.

  “Miss Monrova, please,” Drakos sighed. “Don’t be so naïve. Now, I’ll ask you again: What do you know of Miss Fresh’s ability? What is its range? Its limitations?”

  “Go to hell,” she replied.

  Drakos glanced at his wrist, reading the illuminated numbers on his subdermal implant.

  “Do we have time?” he asked, speaking to the air.

  He nodded, as if to himself.

  “Very well, then.”

  Drakos clapped his hands, and the beach dissolved. Without warning, Eve found herself surrounded by flames, blindingly bright, impossibly fierce. The floor beneath her was blistering, and she screamed as her bare feet were scorched. Collapsing to her knees, she screamed again, feeling the fire eating her flesh. It was a pure and perfect agony, inescapable, absolute. Curling over, she could feel her fingers blackening like twigs, her hair burning, her eyes bursting, running down her cheeks and cooking on her skin like the insides of broken eggs.

  “Something less traditional, perhaps?”

  Drakos clapped again, and the scene shifted. The flames were gone, replaced by a snowstorm: arctic, howling, pummeling. The heat on her body was quenched in one moment of sweet relief, and then the cold reached past the bliss and punched its way into her heart. Eve gasped, the chill piercing her spine, boiling on her skin. She looked up at Drakos, standing in the tempest with his thin shirt and shorts, utterly unaffected. She tried to speak, but her throat had seized closed. Knives of ice in her lungs. Her eyes frozen solid inside her skull.

  Drakos clapped, and they were back on the beach again, Eve on her knees, gasping as the bitter cold melted beneath that gorgeous sun. She knew this was a simulation. That none of what was happening was actually happening. But the pain, god…she’d never felt anything like it in her life….

  “The mind is its own place,” Drakos said, “and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”

  Eve curled her hands into fists and took hold of her tears. She recalled those words from years ago. Sitting with Raphael in Babel’s great library, listening rapt as the lifelike read aloud from—

  “Paradise Lost,” she whispered.

  Drakos only smiled. “As I explained, this will go much easier for you if you cooperate. Simply tell us what we wish to know and all this can stop, Ana.”

  The sky pulsed red again, and that stabbing pain behind her eyes returned—worse than before. The subdermal implant in Drakos’s arm beeped. The man looked down and sighed.

  “I’m afraid that our session’s over for the day, Ana. We’ll meet same time tomorrow. I hope you’ll have considered my offer by then.”

  Eve drew breath to speak. To seethe. To spit.

  Drakos clapped a final time.

  And everything went white.

  * * *

  ______

  Weightless.

  Drifting.

  Silent.

  Eve felt absolutely nothing—no sight, no sound, no touch—and that was perhaps more frightening than all the pain before. But ever so slowly, she started to receive input, to feel the familiar weight of her body, the sense of herself. She opened her eyes, saw she was sitting on a soft chair. She was surrounded by dozens of robots—tall logika with slender limbs, hulls painted surgical white, the winged sun of Daedalus Technologies at their breasts. White light. White walls. Some kind of lab, by the look.

  She couldn’t see a single human in the room.

  A logika plucked a small silver stud from either temple—the wetware interface Drakos had mentioned. A thrill of rage seethed through her, and Eve tried to raise her hands, to reach out and hurt, bend, break. But she was cuffed, elbow to wrist, knee to ankle, in bands of gleaming metal.

  “Get your hands off me!” she spat, bucking in the chair.

  The logika about her paused, turning to study her. They each had one large eye in the center of their faces, ringed with a dozen smaller lenses, all glowing blue. There were ident numbers on their chests: TECH-098. TECH-892. TECH-228. The metal encasing Eve’s limbs groaned as she struggled, the seat rocking beneath her. But the bonds kept her pinned like a fly. Another wave of impotent rage washed through her, and she scanned the room, looking for any way to escape.

  And then she saw her.

  A long tube of glass, filled with liquid, softly aglow. Its walls were pale with frost, but not enough to hide the body within. A golden halo of blond hair floated around her head. Naked skin lit vaguely blue by the lights inside her coffin. ’Trodes at her temples and a tube between her pouting lips. Her eyes were closed—she looked like some girl from a fairy tale waiting for a handsome prince to wake her with a kiss.

  Except there was nothing inside her to wake.

  Ana.

  Eve stared at her doppelgänger. Indignant somehow that these Daedalus roaches had claimed her. To know Ana was in their clutches somehow made Eve’s own captivity burn even worse.

  “Let me go!” A lank blond curl fell over her eyes as she glared at the robots in the room. “Let me go, or I swear, I’ll ghost each and every one of you!”

  The logika shared a glance. The one who’d touched her spoke.

  “TAKE THE SUBJECT TO THE DETENTION LEVELS.”

  “COMPLYING,” came a voice behind her.

  Eve twisted to look over her shoulder. Two tall, bulky logika stood behind her—different models from the ones around her. They had blue-gray hulls, glowing white optics and idents stenciled on their chests: SEC-1098 and SEC-994. Eve glanced around the room again, noted the idents on the other logika.

  TECH-338. TECH-028. TECH-301.

  Technicians.

  Security.

  She felt herself moving, realized her chair was floating—suspended on a cushion of magnetized particles. She bucked and thrashed as the logika propelled her from the room, leaving that sleeping beauty in her glass coffin. />
  The bot guided her down corridors of gleaming white, sterile and pristine, computer panels in the walls. The space outside the lab was bustling, legions of logika filling the halls. Some had the same design as the ones pushing her, but most were the same as the technicians in the lab. Cam-drones buzzed about her head.

  Where are all the humans?

  A cheery, honey-smooth voice spilled over the public address system.

  “A reminder to accredited Daedalus citizens: Freedom Month begins tomorrow. Cutoff for citizen allotment is in six days—if you have friends or family beyond the Wall, be sure to alert them they still have time for one final productivity push. And remember, Citizen Points earned this month are doubled!”

  Eve had no idea what any of that meant, but she had bigger concerns right now. After a short elevator ride, she was pushed onto a new level, down another series of antiseptic hallways, peopled only with logika. Despite her anger, she forced herself to be still, to think, taking note of her surroundings. If she wanted to get out of this place, she’d need to know the damned escape routes at least.

  Finally, she and her logika escorts arrived at a series of what could only be holding cells. The walls were transparent, illuminated pale blue, three meters square. Eve was pushed into the room, still willing herself to be calm, patient, clever. She was faster than her captors. Stronger. This might be her chance to jet, right here.

  She heard the soft tread of feet as the logika backed out of the cell, the whisper of the door as it slid shut. With a soft snapping sound, the cuffs at her wrists and ankles rolled back, and Eve was up and out of her chair in a heartbeat, slamming herself into the door with all her strength.

  A dull whump rang in her ears, and Eve was knocked backward, sailing three meters into the rear wall. Her teeth tingled, her skin ached. She was reminded of her old stun bat, Excalibur, and the day that Lemon had hit her with it on a dare.

  Just to see what happens, her bestest had grinned.

  “HOLDING CELL WALLS ARE ELECTRIFIED,” one of the logika explained with a deep, metallic voice. “PHYSICAL CONTACT MAY RESULT IN SEVERE INJURY.”